Munson: Jewish family adds Muslim teen to their home

May 18, 2013

Ryan Ahmad, 15, right, a foreign exchange student from the Philippines, plays outside with his host brother Zeke Egherman, 10, in the front yard of the Egherman home on Wednesday. Ahmad moved to Des Moines from Swea City in northern Iowa, where he had experienced bullying and teasing. / BRYON HOULGRAVE/REGISTER PHOTOS

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Mara and Adam Egherman of Des Moines welcomed Ryan Ahmad into their home after he struggled with bullying in a northern Iowa community. The Eghermans are Jewish; Ahmad is Muslim. Ahmad says they have a lot in common.

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When Ryan Ahmad signed up for his first trip to America as a Muslim exchange student from the Philippines, he never imagined he would end up washing dishes in a Methodist church hall in rural Iowa.

Or that when he was desperate to find a new home here he would be embraced by, of all households, a Jewish family in Des Moines.

I suppose life can be funny that way when you’re a 15-year-old in search of cross-cultural thrills. Be careful what you wish for, right?

When given the option whether to live in “urban” or “rural” Iowa, Ahmad did choose the latter. He wanted a taste of this exotic rural American lifestyle that he knew zilch about.

He thought he might “learn how to farm and stuff like that.”

“Stuff” turned out to be more difficult for Ahmad, now 16, than he expected.

This boy with a slight build and soft voice who loves to dye and curl his hair felt increasingly ostracized, dejected and even threatened after arriving in August. So last month he finally fled the small town where he had spent most of the school year.

Adam and Mara Egherman offered refuge to this Muslim kid from the other side of the globe. They’re educators; he teaches elementary at Cowles Montessori, and she’s a librarian at Central College in Pella. They have two children: Cora, 15, and Zeke, 10.

An email from the nonprofit based in Ames that had placed Ahmad, Iowa Resource for International Service (IRIS), bounced around the state and finally to the Eghermans. Mara immediately empathized with the Filipino’s plight: She spent a difficult year as an exchange student in 1982 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and had to switch homes near the end of her run — the final year that the American Field Service placed students there, she said, before the end of apartheid a decade later.

“As soon as I read it, I felt it was me,” Mara said of the email.

To be clear, she wasn’t equating rural Iowa today with South Africa in the ’80s — just the notion of a teenager adrift in a strange land.

I should add that I’m not setting up a stereotypical hicktown-versus-cosmopolitan-capital narrative.

As a product of rural Iowa, I know it’s not that simple.

Just like I know that some would scoff at the very notion of Des Moines as cosmopolitan.

By all accounts, religion wasn’t the ultimate source of Ahmad’s troubles in Swea City, a town of about 500 in northern Kossuth County just shy of the Minnesota border.

But religion is a big factor in how Ahmad ended up in Iowa.

He’s among 19 high school students from seven different countries spread around the state this year. They’re part of the post-9/11 Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program that recruits from nations with significant Muslim populations.

“My hope is that we’ve got a next generation that looks at religious differences and religious tolerance completely differently,” said Del Christensen, executive director of IRIS.

Back home Ahmad lives with five sisters and a brother in the crowded city of Basilan, where his parents run the canteen at a local school.

He’s fascinated with fashion and travel, but it sounds like his parents are trying to nudge him toward a stable, lucrative career in medicine.

Ahmad describes his native island country as religiously stratified among Hindus in the north, Christians through its midsection and Muslims in the south.

In many ways Ahmad seems like any other teenager who can tend to be unimpressed and rather blunt.

What was it like settling into life in rural northern Iowa?

“Well, it’s really boring,” he shot back.

And there are a lot of rednecks, he added. But sadly no shopping mall.

I thanked him for his unflinching candor.

Ahmad had slept a night in Swea City before fully realizing that he had indeed arrived at his final destination.

“Is this Swea City?” he asked his host. “Are you sure this is Swea City?”

“I asked, like, three times. ... Where is the ‘city’ part?”

I told Ahmad that he would’ve been even more confused had he been placed in Lake City, Ia. — not only tiny but also lacking a lake.

Ahmad’s roommate at the home of Randy and Rhonda Perdue was a fellow Muslim foreign exchange student from Turkey.

Randy stays on the road most of the time as a truck driver, and Rhonda works as a secretary at a local repair shop. She spent 30 years as a school secretary, which is how she began welcoming exchange students into her home in 2006.

Like all such families, the Perdues pay out of pocket to host these students. It’s a noble venture, not a money-making scheme. (One of the Perdues’ former exchange students from Africa returns later this year to attend Iowa Central Community College, and the couple is helping to pay his tuition.)

“He wasn’t happy,” Rhonda said of Ahmad. “It’s a bad case when you come over here for a year and you’re not happy. It makes for a long year.”

Ahmad did have cultural eye-openings. When he set foot inside the local Methodist church to help wash dishes at a monthly free meal as part of his community service — IRIS requires two hours per month as part of the program — it didn’t mirror the ornate Catholic churches he had seen in the Philippines.

“They don’t have Jesus on the cross,” he remarked.

He baked cookies with Rhonda to dole out to trick-or-treaters on Halloween — a bizarre holiday unobserved in the Philippines.

But all of it was overshadowed by a rift that developed last fall between Ahmad and his roommate, which reportedly spilled over into school.

Ahmad’s sport of choice is cheerleading, which he said is popular among high school guys in the Philippines. He also likes to dress in brightly colored pants and other flashy clothes.

So you can see how Ahmad might make for an easy target among a sea of relatively drab T-shirts and denim.

Ahmad “was bullied at school some and teased a lot,” Rhonda said, and kids “called him ‘gay’ and stuff.”

Ahmad said he dropped out of P.E. because of a bully.

He was among five exchange students this year at North Union High School (along with his roommate from Turkey, a student from Norway and two from Germany). This is the first year for whole-grade sharing among what had been three separate districts. So even native students were extra tense amid the reshuffling of the social pecking order, said high school counselor Bobbie Hardt.

“Not only did (Ahmad) have to get used to rural Iowa, he had to get used to (his roommate’s) culture in the mix and those differences they had,” she said.

For his own part, Ahmad couldn’t understand why he was expected to mute so much of his appearance and behavior to fit in. Wasn’t part of the point of his presence to promote understanding between cultures?

He finally was removed in April after his roommate physically assaulted him, Christensen said.

The Turkish student, who also was on academic probation, was sent back home — a rare move out of the hundreds of such students who have studied in Iowa in the last decade.

So Ahmad found his way to Roosevelt High School and the Egherman home — a grand structure built in 1888 as the first house on its block. The Eghermans bought it six years ago and have been in the process of reclaiming it from its status as a subdivided rental for college kids.

A peace flag flies beneath the Stars and Stripes on the front porch. Mara apologized for the Hanukkah dreidel lights that still hung in the entryway.

What does Ahmad think of moving in with a Jewish family?

“It’s pretty much the same like my religion,” he deadpanned. “They don’t eat pork.”

Ahmad and Cora already spoke a common musical language of Michael Jackson and Maroon 5 and watch “The Voice” together. Last week I overheard Cora educating her exchange brother on the finer points of Midwestern furniture shopping.

“Have you ever been to Ikea?” she asked.

Mara grew up the daughter of a Lutheran minister in Stillwater, Minn. She and Adam, from Champaign, Ill., met each other in college in Madison, Wis. She eventually converted to Judaism.

Similar to Ahmad, in the early ’80s she envisioned that foreign exchange might involve something exotic, such as skiing in New Zealand.

Instead she moved in with a racist white family in South Africa in what effectively was a bunker home and attended an all-white school. The room next to hers held a small artillery. She couldn’t walk the streets much less go for a run.

She lived about five kilometers from Soweto township but hardly realized it.

Yet the experience opened her eyes to inequality across cultures, and the report she delivered to the local Rotary club upon her return wasn’t quite what her hometown neighbors expected.

The Eghermans were more than ready for Ahmad; their extended family already was cross-cultural. One of Adam’s sisters is married to a Muslim from Iran; another was married to a Filipino.

Friday night, Cora had her Jewish confirmation. Saturday, Ahmad joined a tour of the state Capitol with other Muslim IRIS students from around the state.

Earlier this month the Eghermans took Ahmad to the CelebrAsian Heritage Festival in downtown Des Moines, where the first booth they stumbled on was full of Filipinos.

Standing in the middle of a festival in downtown Des Moines, Ahmad said that he felt like he was back in Asia.

It’s been a rough year for the kid, but through it all he seems to have found his own slice of Iowa — thanks to a little help from Johannesburg.

Little by little through the decades, these exchanges can make a big difference.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns, blog posts and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/munson. Connect with him on Facebook (Kyle Munson's Iowa) and Twitter (@KyleMunson).